Trucksong (2 page)

The brumby mob roaded in order and they kept to it tight. First came the second, the Left Tenant. It was shining white with blue trim and so proud of its painted scrollwork in western patterns. Real classic look and the other trucks in the mob followed. They each had their own colour scheme, one with candy apple green and purple and bright yeller highlights, one with crazy patterns of light blue lines on a dark blue body, one grey with thick black markings, arrow heads and barbs and geometric magic encasing wicked wheel arches and chrome trim, one with moving glyphs shifting right on top of angled lines and a snarling grill. They pranced on in gunning their engines and glowing neon running lights in the fading sun. And then at the end, the Brumby King itself powered into the gorge. It was dinged with buckled panels and stained with rust, mud and grassy tufts stuck up under the running boards. The others were vain in their looks but the Brumby King’s pride was in its dusty scars. They circled around, thumping out bass beats from their sound systems that shook out the birds from the trees. The dust flowed up in clouds. Smoov had been gathering up the showgear, and then he saw me standing and he cuffed me upside the head.

‘Stash the gear, dickhead’ he said. The sweat soaked through his stained shirt and his eyes lit and wild.

I were frozen in fear, dazed from the slap and me mouth open slack in wonder at those brumby trucks massing and grooving to get in close to where they could take a shot at Smoov. Smoov had done plenty of chats with indie trucks but these wild brumbies chilled him same as me. They were smart as, they could do a pretty good job of fixing themselves up and even make babby trucks. Different story if they were indies, but he wasn’t going to try anything on with this mob, they were powerful machines built of steel and rust and pain, and packing rounds of bullets made from bone and scraps of shrapnel from roadside wrecks and they gushed tongues of fire from their flamers. Some trucks could be tamed but not this mob run by the Brumby King, wheezing smoke out through its stacks but it wasn’t no diesel, you could tell just to look.

They circled around their King and formed up about half a click from the camp. The ground shook from the hammering of their engines and the rumbling of the rocking sounds pumped from bassy woofers deep in their chassis. Smoov was almost ready to go, too busy even to clip me for still being frozen to the spot at the sight of those monsters that burned and looted everything they could find, except this time it was us there in front of them.

Isa said, ‘We gotta move.’

Smoov threw a tote at me and pushed what gear he could into another bag that he hanged from me shoulder and then we were running, leaving behind what we couldn’t carry. The trucks only had one road in. They couldn’t get all the way around us. There was the gorge and the creek running through it on the other side, so that’s where we turned while the dread sounds of a brumby jam bounced off the canyon walls with beefy bass and slack rim snare. The Left Tenant mounted the spout of a flamer on its engine cowling, tipped with the bright blue spark of pilot light, and a tongue of fire stretched out towards us. Another brumby opened up with its fifty cal, deep chattering and pinging the dust with bone bullets around us in the howling of their engines and the glowering gloom of sunset. Smoov took us up through the boulders and scree on the side of the canyon where the brumbies wouldn’t pass. Though they were strong and fierce, they were leery of getting scratches on their paint and dents in their panels. Smoov pushed us on through the night, grazed hands and scratched faces in the thorny scrub as we found our way first up then down and across the creek. Then up again to the other side and away while the lights sparked out in the night from the brumby mob. They worked back and forwards on the other side searching for signs of our passing but there were none in the darkness.

A breathless strange night under the stars, creeping through the scrub as the sounds got lost in the distance and the ground we put between us and them. Smoov cursing at the lost gear but taking stock and fingering his pendant to accept the Wotcher’s code. Me eyes were heavy since the rush of panic were flushed out of me body with the cold sweat drying fearstink into me clothes. I started to look back on those days spent talking with the creatures in the rocks and talking without words in that gorge in that wet season of fat rains and full billabongs bursting with life crawling up out of the cracks. Those memories stayed with me and growed inside me until I was not sure if they ever even happened. I don’t know where the truth lies, which I whispered that to Isa in the cold night march while Smoov scouted ahead.

‘The truth is what you can hold in your hand,’ said Isa. ‘The truth is the power them trucks got to raid us and murder with fitty cals and flame throwers.’

‘But there’s truths you can’t hold. Like the truth of sunrise and sunset and the Wotcher’s passing,’ I said.

‘Only truth that matters is what you can take away from someone else and we was droved out of the gorge by the power of them brumbies that wanted to take a piece of the Wotcher’s truth from Smoov.’

‘I never seen nothin like truth from Smoov’s showins. It’s all patterns and programs and bits that don’t make no sense,’ I said.

‘Yair, well you’re a dumbshit. I reckon the brumbies are after the Wotcher coz they’re trying to crack the understanding of where they come from and what they are in the world.’

I came to see later the brumby trucks had their own truth they were chasing.

Me name is Jon Ra and I’m typing this out on an old typewriter I found one time in the dirt, it was a rotted and rustspecked case half buried in the ground. Sometimes the earth spat up stuff what’d been swallowed for a long time. The case used to be a greeny colour but it’d got all bleached and rusted. I pulled it out and later Smoov taught me the ways them different letters fit together into words and the words clumped in rows and that’s how they roaded. It was an old machine, not like the seamless tech that glows inside the trucks powering themselves along the highways and the backroads. It was small enough to carry with me everywhere and though the dust got inside and made it stick, I lubed it when I could. I found a bunch of papers what I used for messages, a little stack of cards yeller with age and the ribbon could be inked with soot and sticky saps and water. I cranked them in and wrote on them, then I could shuffle them around, because sometimes it was hard to keep things straight in the order they happened. Like right now, all this stuff is all ready happened and I’m working up a start to this tale. I’m shuffling the pieces and gathering them together.

This little machine had the letters HERMES on it and I often wondered what it meaned as I sat in the flickering firelight pondering what to write. Who was that HERMES and what was her game? It were a strange name for a machine, like if I was going to name it, I’d call it Clackerplay or Writerman, something with some meaning. Instead, it was a bunch of letters with different meanings. HERMES, that’s like /her/, yeah? It was a woman’s /me/ only there were more than one. It’s her me/s, her different forms and shapes. The different changes she made, how sometimes I could look at the light falling on Isa’s face and see one thing, then when darkness came down another light might take up in her eyes. She was always shifting and changing, we all were, all the time. Writing was one way to stop the changes. When something is lettered, it’s fixed on the page. You can change your story or the way you think on it, but you can’t change them words. Once they’ve been wrote down, that’s it. They’re yours and you’ve gotta deal with it.

That was the meaning I took from it anyway. I wondered about the magic of that name, the mystery of it. There was power in the HERMES. Power everywhere you looked. There was power in the trees, in the sun, in the wind. There was power in the rolling of the wheels on the road. All you needed was an alternator and a cell to store the juice.

After I found the HERMES and Smoov taught me some lettering, it came to me in a dream a few weeks after. In the dream, I cranked words into that wording machine and it all were making sense. It wasn’t quite the same machine as the one I found, this one had the same keys but it also had a power chord that I had plugged into the show cells. I finished a sentence and leaned in. I took a big whiff of it and the smell was like nothing I’d known, it nearly knocked me down, machine oil and solvents and ink and something underneath.

The smell of truth.

I knew then it was a way I could use to set out me own true self. I could be free from Smoov’s moody changes and the beatings and grief he gave me, which was funny really because it was Smoov who showed me writing in the first place so I could document his shows and I kept all the trancecrypts in the typewriter case along with these pages here. Smoov showed me the shapes of the letters all lined up on a grid, and you turned the crank for a new line and the machine moved one row in the tab and together the whole thing rattled out lines of letters running down the page and across the page it spelled out words. The typewriter is an instrument to take measurements of your mind, and it leaves behind road signs on the page to show the way.

Now I still got this typewriter and no more of Smoov’s trancecrypts to write down. Just how I found a way inside meself. I’m telling you this story and it’s the truth. It’s all true, every word of it, I swear, written in campfire smoke and truckdream haze aftertaste. Smoov showed me writing to write down the notes of his shows. He showed Isa too, but she didn’t take to it like me. She was always more interested in being a showman herself and interpreting the trancemissions from the Wotcher. She reckoned the Wotcher held all the knowing of the past and if she could find the right link to get into it and extract the knowing we could rise our selves up and live in the glittering gigacities again. The machines would all work how they should and not be scavenging for bodies and parts just to live and there would be a system again, a straight system like what they’d had back then where the buildings talked to each other, grew in amongst each other like a forest and the world was a sweet and easy place.

Smoov thought it too but he was all for interpreting the signs and meanings of the Wotcher’s leavings. He was looking for a pattern in the jumbled sounds and images beamed down from on high each night. But for Isa, it was different, she didn’t have no time for patterns. She wanted to get straight at the heart of things and find a way to talk direct to the Wotcher and get the secrets. She went at it straight, like a goanna to a feed, to find a way into the coding of the Wotcher’s trancemissions so that the desert backroads could raise itself from the dust and the troddendown mud.

She was always tweaking her link to the Wotcher and looking over Smoov’s shoulder for tips and so it was up to me to find out the ways of the typewriter’s lettering and keep track of Smoov’s showings. Smoov was a picture showman going from camp to camp and they’d come from miles around to see what he’d do with the lightning up on the screen, which was really just a white sheet strung up between two rusting shipping cans. We’d travel on the road showing hellfire pictures for folks to know the way of things. Telling the stories of the end times and the broken down system and them trucks what came screaming along the desert highways and thrumming their tech.

We fell out of the wet season and wandered the backroads shanty towns, building back up the show gear after the raid and trying to steer clear of any brumby trucks. It’s all mixed up in me head. I’m shuffling the deck, trying to find a way to order things. One night we was in a camp and saw the Wotcher show coming in, it was another showman called Dane Roadson. The pictures he lit from the Wotcher shined on the screen, fragments of the old times and put together with trucksong and static fills. One stuck in me memory, a picture of a bold black truck rolling on an open highway where all the lanes were clear. It roaded fast and the rider sat up high in control. They must have had some wicked tech back then to make a truck so tame like that, I was in awe. Roadson shifted on to the telling part and started up his rambling of lessons on how to live and how to pull together and hear the Wotcher’s static in our own lives and find the pattern of the knowing of the old times. The gigacities were wasted and deadly now but if the Wotcher could be tuned right, we could take them back. All the people from the camp and the lands around were there to hear it and they sat while he did his thing, but that night he was too high and by the end there weren’t much meaning to be taken from it. He didn’t put it all together like a good showman would. Me and Isa ate corn cobs charred with coal and chicken grease, and sat on the ground as the camp folk wandered past in the dark. Mangy dogs ranging around just out of firelight, fighting and fucking. Me bones got the jump on me smarts and I turned to Isa and tried to pash her, but she wouldn’t have a bar of it, though our arms and legs were touching. We were sitting close and she didn’t seem to mind that too much. Me dick was hard as. Smoov was off somewhere doing deals, swapping patches and haggling for tobacco and ganja and cactusflower grog.

‘I’m not gunna,’ she said.

‘Aw, come on,’ I said.

‘Nah, I gotta keep me head. I’m gunna be showman one day too. There’s more to life in this world than what you can see in the backroads, and showin’s the way to get a window on the gigacities.’

‘Showin’s not all there is,’ I said.

‘It’s the secret of findin out the Wotcher’s knowin and the seeds of the past times and how to get back to what we’ve all been cut separate from,’ she said.

‘Ah I’m sick of hearin of the old times. Howdya know it was so good back then?’ I said.

‘It’s in the pictures of the gigacities, in the fragments from the Wotcher’s trancemission, the towers of light and the buildings that spoke to each other and the system of the world that worked so sweet,’ she said.

I tried it on again, slipping me arm around her but she turned away. I said, ‘Don’t you see how we could be together and I could get outta here away from Smoov and his beatins?’